Spatial analytics startup Carto today announced that it has closed a $61 million funding round led by prominent technology investment firm Insight Partners.

The round also included the participation of a half-dozen other backers, including the venture capital arm of Salesforce.com Inc. and Accel. Carto has raised more than $90 million in funding to date. 

Carto, officially CartoDB Inc., will use the capital to enhance its namesake spatial analytics platform, which helps companies derive insights from geospatial data. T-Mobile US Inc., Mastercard Inc. and The Coca-Cola Co. are among the enterprises that use Carto’s software to support their operations.

Spatial analysis is a data processing method that involves turning business records into maps to make them easier to work with. It’s an approach that lends itself to many use cases, from planning new store locations to optimizing supply chains. Carto’s platform promises to remove much of the technical complexity historically involved in special analysis projects. 

Carto’s platform runs on cloud data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. The platform can turn geospatial records from the data warehouse on which it’s deployed into a map to make it easier for business users to identify useful patterns. 

A retailer looking to open more stores could use Carto to build a map that highlights cities where competitors have a limited presence. Logistics companies, meanwhile, can leverage the startup’s platform to optimize their supply chains by finding faster delivery routes. The telecommunications sector is another market that Carto targets: The startup says its software helps carriers with tasks such as planning network upgrades.

“The rise of the data warehouse has allowed organizations to unify and connect all their data in a single location, and geospatial data is no exception,” said Carto Chief Executive Officer Luis Sanz. “Now, thanks to our cloud native offering, they can also perform spatial analytics on top of them.”

Carto offers a tool called Builder as part of its platform that allows a company’s business users to create maps without writing any code. Data connectors provide the ability to add information from external sources to a map when needed. A user exploring opportunities to optimize delivery routes between a company’s warehouses, for example, could add in weather and traffic information. 

For technical users with more advanced requirements, Carto provides the ability to manipulate data using the SQL query language. The SQL support is also useful for developers. Software teams can use the feature to build applications that automatically perform analyses in Carto’s platform, the startup says.

The company will use its new funding round for feature development. In particular, the startup plans to roll out enhanced integrations with the cloud data warehouses where its enterprise customers store their business information.

Image: Carto